Pages

Jan 6, 2010

Deconstructed: 5 Minutes of Life - A Primer

Posted by
Siddharth Kaushal

Deconstruction: An artistic rendition

Let my start be an
emphasis on the fact that this is a rather abstract and esoteric description of
a conception which, as within actuality, is a simple experience of life, a
plain picture to imagine once it is constructed correctly but due to our
conditioned experience, comprehension and semantic representation of the world
it may prove elusive initially to perfectly internalize the view that I hope I
succeed to deliver. We will first deconstruct the view that we hold of the
'passage of life' through time and then reconstruct the composition it in a
particular manner with different (substitute) elements. Now instead of actually
stating that what I am going to eventually describe I'd rather lay a foundation
on which to do so.

A moment of reflection is
enough to imagine the vividness and variety of the experience of life that we
all undergo everyday. More specifically the stream of consciousness that
characterizes the passage through time. You will have to imagine the “going-on”
of life as a flux of consciousness through the cross section of time. This
cross section of time is ‘the present’. For any given moment, the very given
moment is the present and thus the temporal cross section through which stream
of consciousness comes from a theoretical future, be-comes the perceived
present and the very next moment be-comes part of actual past. Look at it the
other way, where you imagine time flowing “through”consciousness, here the
consciousness becomes like the ‘filter-detector’ we ‘dip’ in the flow of time
and perceive certain aspects of it that get filtered through the consciousness
into the semantic center of our brain. I hope you’re able to think this idea as
a visual representation where consciousness is like the light which illuminates
the invisible flow of time.

Let us understand one
thing very clearly, there is potentially infinite information that we passively
‘encounter’ every moment and our consciousness is the filter that only lets us
selectively process the relevant information from it and this happens as per
our picture of the world and every associated concept in our head. Now its we
can all imagine how a regular TV screen radiates only light in a combination of
three primary colours in continuously varying proportions and/but we perceive
it as a meaningful image. Much the same way from of the whole domain of our
sensory channels, i.e., the sum total of all that there is to ‘sense’ at a
given moment, we only perceive what our particular sensory system is
conditioned to pick from the reality (that given moment) by our
meta-consciousness.

We see different objects,
backgrounds, colours, shapes, sizes, features, contours, luminosities etc using
our visual equipment. We hear many sounds, the noise of vehicles, objects
clashing with each other/rolling over each other, musical notes, the wind
blowing, water gushing, people talking, metal banging, background noises etc
using our auditory equipment. Same goes for touch, all the different ways we
sense it, be it water trickling down the body, the sun burning down on it, the
touch of another person, the feel of fabric on our skin etc. All these senses
combined with a cognitive/psychological interpretation/view give meaning to our
everyday experience of life. Before i reveal the purpose to touting this here
I’ll ask you to picture a common situations plucked right from life as we all
know and live it.Lets start from the time
one gets up in the morning.First thing that you "see" is perhaps the
change in luminosity form the time your eyes were shut to the ‘now’ when your
eyes are open. Once open, your eyes will see the bed, the room, all the objects
in it, all the various colours, all the shapes, all the sizes there, the
contours, the height, length,depth etc. You turn your head and to get a visual
image of whatever there is present in the room but was hidden from the field of
vision when you were turned the other way. The important thing is that whatever
this image you see will sort itself out into a foreground and a background. You
will make sense of the composition of this picture, i.e. you will sense the
distinct elements/objects/constituent parts that together make the whole image.
Now this description as one
D (1)

We again start from the
time one gets up in the morning. First thing that you "hear" is
perhaps the "silence" of your room (assuming you are alone in your
room)in contrast to the absolute silence that you "heard" or detected
when you were asleep. Then a moment later you'd probably register distant
sounds (cars on a road outside, someone talking in the other room, birds
chirping outside, the mild wind current against the external walls of your
house etc.) You perhaps hear the music from your alarm and quickly establish
that, as the "foreground" of the audio "image" that you
sense while all other sounds become a part of the background for that duration.
And all this without conscious effort. You perhaps hear the sounds of the bed
sheet crumpling as you get up, maybe then the sound of your foot against the
floor as you start walking. Now this description is two D (2)

We yet again start from
the time one gets up in the morning. First thing that you sense by touch is
again this sort of transition from the nothingness of an unconscious state
(sleep) to an abrupt feeling of matter in contact with your body. Now you may
feel the hardness of the bed, the softness of the bed sheet, the contours of
the wrinkles on the blanket as you grab to put it aside, you may feel the
weight of your leg momentarily suspended in air as you get off the bed, and
then the cold floor as you step towards the loo etc. Now this description is
three D (3)

We go back to the time one
gets up again but to keep it simple this time we assume that the smell in the
air is fairly neutral (as should be in a well ventilated clean house) and that
the taste in the mouth that one senses is neutral as well (perhaps one's own
saliva). Now this description is four D (4)

Finally imagine just about
any sequence of thoughts that can go on in an average man's head, say for
example there is a proposal to sent today in the office and a very important
one at that, imagine a person besotted by this worry mulling over the issue
soon as he gets up in the morning. Or else, for the benefit of readers who cant
really relate to the office example, imagine a man going to college today with
a firm resolution in mind to initiate a conversation with a hot chic he never
spoken o but ardently admired all along and that they have a common class today
for the first time and it presents itself as the perfect opportunity to talk to
her. Now you may mark any of these series of thoughts as four D (5)

Now, we go back one more
time to the moment that one gets up in the morning, only now you've to imagine
all (1), (2), (3), (4), (5) descriptions running parallel, rather concurrently,
and add to it any particular emotional flavour (associated emotional states) or
topping to it (may depend on the levels and kinds of neurotransmitters in one's
brain that given moment, the general circumstance in life of the person's
placement terms of health, wealth, ego etc) and what you get
is.......................(almost) the everyday experience of life!!!!!!!

Well... hold on just a sec
there, we still haven't accounted for one crucial thing here!! Although it’s
not entirely necessary to make the point that I am trying but would render the
description above woefully inadequate without itself, so here it is... MEMORY. Now I have mentioned it
separately after the 5 descriptions + associated emotional state(s) (AES) because it is a supervening
function of our brains that ensures continuity of experience and modification
of behavior through learning. Translation - it's more like a combined record of
all the 5Ds + AES from the past. So in that sense, the "stream of
consciousness" that we experience is like a river composed of 5 Ds + AES
which flows into the "reservoir" of memory (and quite a bit of it
evaporates as well from there.)

Now for the last time in
this part of the article, lets again go back to the time one gets up in the
morning, with all the 5 Ds running concurrently, accompanied by the AES and
with a cognitive acknowledgment of your own identity (i.e. you are you, that
this is earth, this is you house, your bed..So on for all the aspects
establishing a sense of persistent identity) which comes from the memory
......now what we have is an accurate phenomenal description of a few moments
of .............. an everyday experience of life of getting up in the morning!!
Phew!!

Right.. !! Now that we
have described/constructed this, I will deconstruct this experience in terms of
energy exchange occurring in an open system .. But that I’ll do in the a later post!

1 comment:

Nice..!our senses are like I/O points in a CPU filling data in bits and bytes in their respective registers. Our processors runs a program that works in consonance with the updated information and concurrently processes them to give a combined result/output/status. Basis the processing required, some registers are redundant and some are acknowledged.waiting for the second post..